


Pillar of Salt

by bluebacchus



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dave can see ghosts too, M/M, POV Second Person, Past Child Abuse, Sex, Still NSFW, Stream of Consciousness, Vietnam War, but like artistic stream of consciousness descriptions of sex, egregious amounts of bible references, southern gothic influence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 05:32:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19202890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebacchus/pseuds/bluebacchus
Summary: Klaus said a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad, but all things that you wanted to hear just because it was him that was saying them.It's a hot night in Saigon and Dave thinks about a lot of things, but mostly about Klaus.





	Pillar of Salt

**Author's Note:**

> Do you ever just like, get into a William Faulkner mood and then watch four episodes of Ghost Adventures and then get carried away writing at two in the morning?

It’s about a hundred degrees and you’ve got an armful of human body. Not in the same was as yesterday, when Hawkins took a sniper bullet to the gut and Parker and Reynolds carried him and you held his intestines in your hands, pushing them back through the hole and trying to close it up with a field dressing and the sleeve torn off your shirt. Not in the same way like last week when Reynolds got jumpy and shot into the jungle and hit a ten year old girl in the head and you carried her back to the town nearby, really just an encampment of huts based around a filthy well that buzzed with black flies and stunk like holy hell and for some reason all you could do was worry about the state of their drinking water while the young ladies cried and the old ladies thumped their fists against your chest and the old men shook their heads and muttered to themselves in strange and foreign dialects.

No, it was a hundred degrees and the body in your arms was alive. His heart was beating, all him limbs were present and accounted for, and he was happy, or at least you thought he looked happy after he took you back to the hotel room you were sharing in Saigon and the way he looked at your naked body after you shucked your civvies to the ground and the way he writhed and moaned on the bed underneath you and whispered your name over and over like a prayer as you rocked and panted above him, in him, and when you leaned down to kiss him when you came, surrounded by squalor and sin and heaven.

The fan was turning lazily on the ceiling above your heads and the mosquitoes buzzed in and out of the open window that hungrily waited to swallow any breeze that passed through the alley between the ramshackle buildings. There was a black fly, one of the ones that crept around the well where the dead girl was buried by the town that hated you, that outraced the blades of the fan and flew in circles, buzzing drowned out by the clamour of the street below them. There were all kinds of voices drifting in from the window that faced the alley. The alley didn’t get much traffic, you thought, because it was a dangerous looking alley with broken glass and used needles and every so often a poorly disguised guy from the embassy would walk down it and glance up at their window and make sure no one was watching as he met with a local and exchanged cash for promises and that’s how the United States gets their heroin, or so Klaus said. Klaus said a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad, but all things that you wanted to hear just because it was him that was saying them.

“They’re gonna land on the moon in a couple months,” he said once and you laughed and said there’s no way they’re gonna spend all their money on landing men on the moon when there were men dying every day in a war that wouldn’t end. He got real sad then, and you felt bad for making him sad because he looked so beautiful when he was happy but you never told him that then because you never told anyone that before, except your mother and your mother wasn’t another soldier in the U.S. army who you had to share a tent with every night.

You told him that when you got back to your room instead, after he kissed you at the disco and turned his back on all the pretty girls looking for a dance, just like you did after you bumped into him on the dance floor and you were overwhelmed with want. “You’re beautiful,” you had said, when the door was shut and the curtain pulled and the man from the embassy had finished his business and left the alleyway, straightening his tie and heading to the main street where he could pick up a girl or two for the night. You told him he was beautiful and he stopped talking for once and looked at you like you were insane and you thought for a minute that maybe this was all a misunderstanding and you got it wrong, but then he stepped forward and took your face in his hands and he was so gentle when he kissed you that you thought maybe he didn’t at all, but then he kissed you again, longer than before and harder than he did at the disco and said “no one’s ever told me that before” and if it was true it was a crying shame because Klaus Hargreeves is the most beautiful creature on God’s green earth and you’re lucky enough to have him here, in your arms, stuck to your chest with humid air and post-coital sweat, sleeping like a babe in arms in the hot, sticky neon night of Saigon.

He stirred then, peeling his cheek off your bare chest and looking up at you with eyes like stars, like fireworks on the fourth of July and you still can’t believe that he’s here with you. “What are you looking at?” he whispers, and his body heat is adding about fifty degrees to your body temperature but you refuse to move because he’s like the sun in the way that you need it to live and feeling its rays beat down on your face is the most wonderful feeling after a long dark winter and even though you know you’re getting burned you won’t go inside until well after the sun has set because summer is never long enough and the lingering redness of the burn will remind you that once there was light and once there was heat and once the sun deigned to touch you with its long fingers and you are eternally grateful.

“You’re beautiful,” you say again, because you can now and maybe he’ll say something else this time or maybe he’ll just kiss you again and you don’t mind either way. But this time he laughs lightly and rolls away from you and though the sludgy air fills in the empty space to cool the sweat on your chest you miss the contact. You don’t have a lot of pride when it comes to matters of the heart so you chase after him, shifting on the lumpy mattress until you’re close enough to fit your bodies together again, his back to your front and you wrap an arm around him and your heart sings when he relaxes into you, tipping his head back in silent consent for you to kiss his neck and lick the salt off it. You think about Lot’s wife and the pillar of salt she turned into when she looked back at Sodom and you think about the future and how you’re just like Lot’s wife and you’re gonna keep looking back on this moment and refuse to move on.

You’re too scared to believe there’s a future here, with him, not when there’s death all around and you’ve been here long enough that almost everyone you’ve known has either been killed or wounded, and some of the wounded are being sent back, patched and fraying around the edges and held together by uneven stitches that are sometimes literal and sometimes you swear you can see their stuffing falling out of their brains and they scream and holler to high hell or take their rifles in their mouths or run off into the jungle and are never seen again. There’s no future here but you want one because you want him and you want to believe that he wants you too.

“How did a nice guy like you end up with a fuck-up like me?” he says this time and if you weren’t already holding him you’d take him in your arms and kiss him on the head and tell him that he’s amazing and smart and funny and good. You tighten the arm around his waist and tell him all these things and when you say he’s good he shrinks in on himself and you wonder why. “You’re a good person, Klaus Hargreeves,” you say again, and he shakes your arm off so he can turn and face you in the bed. You’re so close you’re sharing a pillow and he looks serious and sad and curious all at once so you lean in to kiss that look off his face and he kisses back, passionately and hungrily and you need to finish the thought before you start touching each other again because once that happens you can’t do more than pant and moan and say Klaus, Klaus, Klaus and if him saying your name sounded like a prayer, it was nothing compared to you saying his because it was. Every time you said his name you were praying to God that he would stay and that he would love you and that you were willing to go and fight every single VC soldier barehanded if it meant you could run away with him and live somewhere where you could be together.

“Why don’t you like it when I say nice things about you?” you ask, pulling away from his next kiss and hoping that it’ll be the last of his kisses you ever pull away from. He says ‘I do like it,” and tries to kiss you again and you can’t deny two kisses in a row so you let him and when he pulls away he says, “I like it a lot,” and takes your hand and presses it down between his legs where he’s hard and hot and pressing against your leg but you didn’t notice because you were too busy realizing that somewhere between the bus and the disco you’ve fallen madly in love with him.

You can’t hold back your feelings because you never learned how, not when mother told you to cry wild and proud when you were upset and pa screamed at her for it and told you that you were a man, act like one. She would go dance in the woods sometimes after dark when you and your siblings weren’t allowed out because there were dangerous things in those woods and when you asked your grandma why you always pulled the shades when the last colours of sunset faded that was the answer she gave. Mother wasn’t afraid of the forest because she respected it, she said. She respected the Old Gods and when she said that to you it was the only time you ever saw Pa hit her and you screamed and he hit you too. He never did it again because he never came home from hunting one day in the very forest that mother danced in and you were no longer afraid of. It wasn’t the last time you saw him though because he came back like they all came back, first in a dream and then when you were awake, bloody and dying in a state of in-between where blood never flowed and death never came and you told your mother and she burned sage and sprinkled sea salt and hung little wooden talismans in all the windows and you never saw him again.

Klaus sees them too, you know, because sometimes you catch a glimpse of something in the trees that isn’t human and he’s already staring at it and watching like he can see it head on and not just out of the corner of his eye like you. You never brought it up and you don’t plan on bringing it up now because you can feel that you’re alone in the room and you’re not really sure how to start a conversation about seeing ghosts in the jungle, let alone a conversation when you’re both naked in bed and your hands are on him and his are on you and you want nothing more than to give yourself over to the sensations and let your body run wild.

He opens his mouth to take your bottom lip in between his and when he pulls away he licks at the corner of your mouth and you never knew that was such a turn-on but now you do and you say “do that again” and he does, because you fit together like you were made for each other, and when you’ve finally had enough of rutting against each other you’re bold enough to push him down on the bed and take the lead this time, hovering over him and kissing him and pressing inside him again where he’s still open and welcoming from last time.

You build up the pace until it’s hard and fast and Klaus is losing it under you, losing himself. You’re scared of where he goes when his eyes glaze over and he looks into the distance, so you kiss him again and he comes back to you, wrapping long arms around your neck and holding you so close against him that you can’t pull back as much as you were before so you grind your hips into him and you must hit the right angle because he makes the most amazing sound you’ve ever heard like an angel in ecstasy so you stay there, moving and pushing and pulling and kissing him like the sun kisses your face until your eyes are burning and burning with tears and you feel him tighten underneath you and that’s it for you, you’ve crested the peak and now you’re tumbling down together and you bury your face in his neck and the prayer of Klaus, Klaus, Klaus turns into a confession of I love you, I love you, I love you and he holds you in his arms and he says it back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! HMU on twitter if you want to chat


End file.
